Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.